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Why dont' recruiters do enough BD?
112 Plays25 days ago
Episode 90 has news for 26 November 2024 and Question of the Week "Why don't recruiters do enough BD?"
#RNA #RecruitmentPodcast #RecruitmentNewsAustralia
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Transcript
Streamlining Recruitment with Bullhorn
00:00:09
Speaker
Bullhorn's powerful, easy-to-use applicant tracking system lets you manage the entire recruitment process from a single interface, from desktop or mobile device on any browser. From job submission to candidate placement, Bullhorn eliminates manual data entry, streamlines the end-to-end recruiting process and enables your team to move faster and work smarter. Visit bullhorn dot.com to find out more.
National Recruitment Challenges
00:00:37
Speaker
And this is the news for the week commencing the 25th of November, 2024. I'm Adele Last. National recruitment activity declined last month with 42% of employers recruiting, a 3.4 compared to September, according to the JSA Recruitment Experiences, an outlook survey of over 1,000 employers in October. Compared to the prior month, more capital city employers were recruiting in October, up 1%.
00:01:05
Speaker
However, there was a nine percentage point drop in the recruitment activity of non-capital city employers. The national recruitment difficulty rate of 52% of recruiting employers was unchanged compared to September. Employers in capital cities reported greater recruitment difficulty up five points to 50% of recruiting employers, but it was the opposite for non-capital city employers who reported an easing in difficulty of seven points to 55%.
00:01:34
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The share of employers expecting to increase their staffing levels in the upcoming three months declined by three points to 19%.
Celebrating Recruitment Excellence at SEEK Awards
00:01:43
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The winners of SEEK's annual recruitment awards, the SARAs, were announced in Melbourne last Thursday evening. Taking home the top gong in each category were the following. Small recruitment agency, Pulse. Medium recruitment agency, Miller Leath. Large recruitment agency, ProTech Group. New recruitment agency, Leverage Me. RPO, Hudson RPO.
00:02:05
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DE&I, Ramstad, Candidate Experience, Atlas Partners, Leader of the Year, Samantha Miklas of Cornerstone Medical, and for Recruitment Consultant of the Year, Claudia Fromdon of Circuit Recruitment.
The Rise of Gen AI in Job Ads
00:02:21
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Over the past year, the share of total job postings mentioning Gen AI or related phrases has tripled in Australia, but grown even more substantially in other countries.
00:02:32
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Job aggregator indeed compared job ad postings in September 2023 with September 2024 across nine countries, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the US. France topped the list with a growth rate of 6.8 times, although from a very low base. Ireland and Singapore had the equal second largest growth multiple of all nine countries at 4.6 times.
00:03:00
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Australia's growth rate of three times was the lowest of the nine countries, although its base rate was higher than four other countries. The job category in Australia most likely to mention Gen AI was data analytics consistent with the results from all eight other countries. Architecture was the second highest, followed by software development and scientific research.
Economic Growth Across Australia
00:03:22
Speaker
The 2023-24 state accounts released by the ABS last week reveal that all states and territories experienced economic growth across the financial year, although the rate of growth varied considerably across the country. The Northern Territory recorded the fastest growth with Gross State Product, GSP, lifting by 4.6% in 2023-24 compared to a 5.2% decline the previous year. This recovery was driven by a 9.5% surge in mining production.
00:03:52
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Another standout performer was the ACT where GSP grew by 4% following a strong increase of 4.7% the prior year. Queensland also performed well recording a 2.1% increase in GSP after a 2.8% rise the previous financial year. New South Wales' 1.2% growth and Victoria's 1.5% growth were results substantially lower than both states recorded in the previous financial year.
00:04:21
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Looking ahead, Deloitte Access Economics forecasts Queensland's growth to be the largest of the three eastern states.
Boeing's Job Cuts Amid Crises
00:04:30
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Last week, giant aerospace manufacturer Boeing notified 10% of its global workforce, approximately 17,000 employees, that their jobs were being made redundant and they would leave the company in the next two months. CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took over in August, told staff in a memo last month that the job cuts would include executives and managers.
00:04:51
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Boeing has lurched from crisis to crisis this year, kicking off in the first week of January when a door panel blew off a 737 MAX jet in mid-air. Since then its CEO has departed, production slowed as regulators investigated its safety culture and 33,000 workers went on strike for seven weeks until early November. The strike shut down production of the 737 MAX, Boeing's best-selling plane and 777s and 767s.
00:05:19
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Boeing employs around 170,000 employees worldwide, mostly based in manufacturing facilities in South Carolina and Washington State.
AI vs Human Poetry: A Surprising Verdict
00:05:28
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Research from the University of Pittsburgh published last week in Nature concludes people now appear unable to reliably distinguish AI-generated poetry from human-authored poetry written by well-known poets. The more human-than-human phenomenon discovered in other domains of generative AI is also present in the domain of poetry in that non-expert participants are more likely to judge an AI-generated poem to be human-authored than a poem that actually is human-authored.
00:05:58
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The researchers assert the findings signal a leap forward in the power of generative AI. Poetry had previously been one of the few domains in which generative AI models had not been able to outrate humans. In the study, people consistently rated AI-generated poems more highly than the poems of well-known poets across a variety of qualitative factors.
00:06:20
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In their interpretation of the results, the researchers suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry. The simplicity of AI-generated poems, specifically the images, themes and emotions, may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.
00:06:49
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The works of 10 English-language poets were chosen for the experiment. The poets included Chaucer, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. The study's participants were 2,330 US-based people with a median age of 37.
Decoding Workplace Happiness
00:07:11
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Approximately 55% of Australians reported that they feel happy at work, according to Sikhs in a rural workplace happiness index.
00:07:19
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The index surveyed over 1,200 workers across a broad range of generations, locations, industries, income levels, and seniorities. The index asked workers how happy they were across various factors such as work-life balance and their senior management. The data was then analyzed to determine how workers rank each factor in contributing to their workplace happiness overall. The top factors that are the most important to Australians happiness at work are the company's purpose, their manager,
00:07:49
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day-to-day responsibilities, company culture, and with stress levels rounding out the top five. By generation, Gen Z are the least happy at work, with baby boomers the most happy. By state and territory, South Australian workers are the happiest at work, 67% self-reporters happy, with workers in WA the least happy at 46%. By sector, public servants and consumer products workers are the happiest at work,
00:08:16
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while 25% of those in engineering are happy making that sector's employees the least happy at work.
New Creative Directions for ADF Recruiting
00:08:23
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Australian Defence Force recruiting last week appointed TBWA Melbourne as its lead creative advertising and digital services agency following a competitive pitch that included incumbent VML, which has held the account for the past six years. The agency's primary role is to drive interest in a career in the Australian Defence Force.
00:08:43
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TBWA Melbourne CEO Kimberly Wells said this appointment allows the agency to bring the best of its offering to the table for the best of all reasons, driving recruitment for the ADF. We're excited to harness our deep strategic and creative capability, cutting edge innovation and cultural intelligence tools to deliver meaningful impact across the total brand experience. We can't wait to get started, well said. The transition period is effective immediately with creative and digital services commencing on the 1st of April next year. And that's the news for the 25th of November, 2024. I'm Ross Clennett. Stay tuned for Question of the Week.
Navigating Business Development in Recruitment
00:09:35
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Question of the week is, why don't recruiters do enough BD? What do you think, Russ? Culture. Starts at the top, Adele. Leaders or owners who complain about their recruiters not doing enough BD. Got to look at themselves in the mirror. And you know why I say that? Why? Because Jeff Morgan and Andrew Banks say it in their book, Flourish and Prosper. I agree with it, by the way.
00:10:03
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But I'd love to quote a couple of sentences from the book, if I may, ah show ahead to support my point of view. So here we are, Flourish and Prosper, page 123 from Chapter 12, The Psychology of Success. The tough part is that as a leader, it all starts with you. You can rant and rave and stomp and moan all you like.
00:10:25
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But at the end of the day, you have to take responsibility for everything that happens to you and around you because you are the center of your own universe. And it's your job as leader to make things go right. Responsibility versus blame.
00:10:45
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I can't stress enough how important it is that as leaders, we take responsibility for our own actions and understand that the external environment will provide a range of challenges on an ongoing basis. The only antidote you have to those challenges, in my opinion, the only way to sustain success is to keep working on yourself. So there you go.
00:11:12
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Ultimately, it's the culture that the leader sets. Do they have a business development culture? Have they set expectations? Have they been clear about how they expect the business development to be done? What sort of accountability do they have in place? So I think it's pretty clear, Adele. It starts at the top. It's the leader and it's the culture that the ah that the leader sets.
00:11:42
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Well, I'm going to throw something in here at Ross and say, what if you are listening to this and you are a very sales oriented owner or leader? What if you have tried to set a culture of doing business development on a regular basis? What if you do demonstrate that yourself? What if you are the one hustling every day and bringing in a lot of the work like we know a lot of owners are and just nobody else is doing it. No one else in the organization is doing BD.
00:12:12
Speaker
To me, that's not all culture then. To me, there could be something wrong with the people that have been hired. They're not fit for that sort of role. Well, that's true. um What makes someone fit to be business development oriented or more likely to do business development? I think it has to be a focus around really understanding the core element of sales that we do in terms of the core part of our business being sales related. I think you really need to make sure when you're hiring people, when you're managing people, when you're motivating people, that they understand what the business is. I know that sounds really silly, but we know that a lot of people get into recruitment or are attracted to recruitment because they see this ah synergy to HR. They see this people orientation. They see
00:13:08
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this idea that I like to talk to people and so I must make a good recruiter. And I think we really need to make sure there's the emphasis on the sales element, the influencing element, the negotiation element, if you don't want those dirty the dirty sales word, think about all the other sales competencies you absolutely have to be recruiting against. The ability to adapt your communication style, the ability to problem solve and and read the room, the ability to be able to, as I said, influence ah negotiate, um think commercially, that business acumen. That sort of stuff is really hard to train someone to do if they're not already naturally you know like that or have a propensity to it. I feel like we hire the wrong people and then we shove them into a culture.
00:13:56
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and it sometimes just doesn't fit and that's why we're losing people too. Well, ah that's true because most owners fall for the four A's of the halo effect. Do you know what the four A's of the halo effect are? No, what's that? You follow quotes today, Ross. Yeah, I am, I am. This time I'm plucking from Lou Adler, who is a US recruitment trainer. He's written a very good book called High With Your Head. And the four A's of the halo effect are,
00:14:22
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that the candidate is attractive, ambitious, affable, and articulate. In other words, a good-looking, extroverted, ambitious person is probably going to, I'll put in vertical as full,
00:14:38
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the recruitment agency owner and that owner thinks that they're going to be good at business development. Oh, I like them. Yeah, I could see myself having a beer with them. You know, that sort of thing that's traditionally used to hire people to be an effective ah recruiter.
00:14:55
Speaker
But um the competencies that you point to are all those competencies, of course, that are not ah guaranteed in someone who's attractive, ambitious, affable and articulate. And that's where many recruitment agency owners go wrong. Absolutely. And I think this is the real dilemma. So this idea that, you you know, why won't they do more BD? We're continually pushing people.
00:15:21
Speaker
And ultimately it's that kind of you might be flogging a dead horse. You have to at some point decide perhaps who are your salespeople and who are your job fillers. And maybe you need to structure your business appropriately around that because the longer you're spending trying to push people into BD who don't want to do it, who aren't good at it potentially, you could be doing brand damage in fact, but the the longer you do that, the more you kind of, as I said, flogging the dead horse and wasting time really.
00:15:50
Speaker
hire the right people, yes, create a culture that that ah satisfies them and sustains that. But um you know maybe we've we both got a point on this one, Russ. So do you mean that 360 degree recruiters are too hard to find and you should focus on finding people who are just BD people, people who just account manage and other people who are just um candidate resources? is that Is that what you're proposing?
00:16:16
Speaker
I think 3.60 with the BD component is is a rare breed. I do think that is a rare and dying breed. I think there are still people out there who are commercially um adept at at being able to do both the sales and the delivery, but I think they are harder to find and it might be easier to be able to segment off, particularly the job filling element. It may not necessarily mean, you know, some people might like to do the 360 and want to have the relationship ongoing with the client, others who don't want to do any BD. They're the ones I think you need to segment off. You know, I've just seen too many in my career. I've worked with literally hundreds of different, you know, styles of people and recruiters. And I myself have tried really hard to get people to fit into that mould, to fit into the sales culture and fit into the mould. And what I found in the very long run, ultimately, they end up potentially in an internal role,
00:17:14
Speaker
um or they leave the industry altogether, um or they spend a lot of time trying to avoid the business development that the rest of us are just carrying out. So you know ah kind of if anybody's out there and feeling you know despondent about, I'm doing all the right things and I just can't get them to do it, you know maybe now it's time to to throw in the towel on on the right stuff. I think to your point,
00:17:38
Speaker
It is hard. It's very hard to find people with the right competencies for a 360-degree role. By its very nature, agency recruitment is challenging. You are not in a position of authority and you are an intermediary seeking to win.
00:17:58
Speaker
influence over candidates and clients. It's a tough job. Only a very small proportion of people are suited to be the job of or to do the job of an agency recruiter. And I think too many agency owners take, let's say, almost the least worst person to fill a seat, and then they don't build from the ground up business development, knowledge and skills.
00:18:26
Speaker
And then, and here's what I reckon is one of the biggest problems that goes beneath the radar in recruitment agencies in terms of VD. too many recruiters work on low-probability jobs for too long because if they really deleted that job or only worked on it for as long as they really should, guess what? They'd have to go out and PD for more work. and Spending too much time on low-probability jobs to me is one of the biggest barriers to um more business development because recruiters might have
00:19:00
Speaker
let's say nine jobs. And I think, oh, it's good. I've got nine jobs on. I don't need to do BD. But in reality, they've probably only got two quality jobs and seven very low quality jobs. And realistically, they need to be spending more time generating high quality jobs rather than over egging the omelet on low quality jobs. Yeah, that's why I'm saying hire the right people first. That's the starting point of it all. And then, yes, certainly put in processes, systems,
00:19:29
Speaker
accountability, all of those elements and you know build that culture around it. But for me, it starts with the person. No, to me, it starts with culture. It starts with the leader and that person's leadership around business development. And I think that when you look, in fact, I'll use the Flourish and Prosper book.
00:19:49
Speaker
If you haven't read it, and I certainly recommend any recruiters who haven't read it or any owners who haven't read it, read it. It's not available in paperback, but I think you can get it on Kindle and Morgan & Banks. The most successful recruitment entrepreneurs this country has ever produced focus very much on personal responsibility and the culture set by the leader at the top. And I reckon that's where it starts and ends. Tell us what you think. Who's right here, Ross or me?
00:20:19
Speaker
Hey, are you liking listening to our podcast, Recruitment News Australia? If you are, it would really help if you could give Ross Kleiner and I a five-star review on whatever podcast app you listen to it on. Please hop onto the review section and give us a review next time you're listening on your favorite episode. And thanks for listening.
00:20:38
Speaker
so